News

Apple releases Podcasts app

Apple has released a new universal app dedicated to subscribing to, viewing and managing Podcasts on iOS devices. Dubbed simply Podcasts, the new app allows users to browse through hundreds of thousands of audio and video podcasts available in the iTunes Podcasts catalog, stream or download individual episodes for offline listening or subscribe to an entire podcast series. A Top Stations feature also provides a unique user interface with a quick view of the most popular podcasts, organized by topics such as arts, business, comedy, news and sports. A radio-like “Now Playing” screen with simple playback controls allow the user to easily skip forward and back and the app integrates with iTunes to access podcasts synced from an iTunes library in the traditional manner. The application also supports syncing episode bookmarks via iCloud for seamless playback between devices along with a built-in sleep timer and the ability to share favourite podcasts episodes via Twitter, Messages and Mail. Podcasts is a universal app requiring iOS 5.1 or later and is available from the App Store as a free download. Syncing episodes requires iTunes 10.6.3 or later and streaming is supported over both Wi-Fi and cellular data connections.

Comments

1

Not too impressed at first glance, at least in comparison to the other Podcast apps in the store. At first glance you might think it has variable speed playback, but it doesn’t really, only 1/2X, 1X and 2X.

No gestures for forward and back.

Searching for TWIT doesn’t turn up This Week In Tech, and the names of the various podcasts run off to the right so you can’t tell which one (small video, mp3, etc feeds) you might want.

No indication of which episodes you’ve downloaded. No settings for download only on WiFi or not.

I had to scroll right through maybe 25 categories to get to Gadgets/Technology.

A lot of the tiles wouldn’t fill in no matter how long I left it running.

Posted by Glenn in Toronto on June 26, 2012 at 10:19 PM (CDT)

1

So with iOS 5 they forced me to use two apps for my podcasts because they moved video podcasts to the Videos app instead of leaving them under the Music app because they couldn’t do something easier like rename the “Music” app if it was bothering someone at Apple that it could play video. Wouldn’t have been so bad, but they downgraded the playback functionality in every way in the process AND downgraded the iTunes app on the iPad further to keep things consistently subpar.

Now, 10 months later we finally get back to treating video podcasts like podcasts, but we still have to use two apps and, going by the widespread reports and reviews, the app is buggy and slow as heck.

Only Apple can figure out how to spend over a year on the development of iOS 5 and now the Podcasts app to give us a substantially more complicated, worse experience than we had with all previous editions of iOS.